(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

This was, said the critics, un-citizenly and un-Christian. I responded in my follow-up piece that:

The context here is advice to kids. Deciding which situation says, “Stay out of this!” and which says, “Help the guy” requires an act of judgment. Kids don’t have very good judgment; so a blanket “Stay out of this!” is not bad advice in context.

Later, writing a web page about the fuss the article generated, I further commented that:

The misfortunes you can encounter by acting the Good Samaritan among blacks … turn up in news stories at least weekly. (Here's one from last week. Here's one from the following week. I'll leave you to continue the series for yourself—not a very demanding task.) I'll admit I haven't done a rigorous statistical analysis by race on all such stories, but I can't recall seeing one that didn't involve blacks.

Ever since those postings a year and a half ago I have received a steady trickle of links, mostly to local news outlets, from readers about nonblack Good Samaritans coming to grief as the hands of blacks they were trying to help. If I were more energetic and better organized, I could probably compile a bookful in the style of Colin Flaherty.

This recent one, which three different readers emailed me, is particularly nasty. More on it here, from which:

[Victim’s daughter] Rachel Sonnenberg Baufield said Saturday that for years, she and her two sisters had begged their parents to move away from what they saw as an increasingly risky block.

But the Sonnenbergs, who had endured burglary and vandals on their property, felt that they had no choice but to stay—they were trapped by an underwater mortgage. Still, Baufield said, her father had remained kindhearted, unable to turn away people who came to his doorstep.

“My dad has helped this community,” she said. “There have been other people who have come to my dad and begged for help, and my dad gave them money because he didn’t want people hurting. And this is the repayment that he gets.” [“20-year-old man charged in slaying of north Mpls. good Samaritan,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, February 3, 2014.]